Technical panel suggests 15-point action plan for facilitating large scale integration of renewable

New Delhi : The Technical Committee in its report on ‘Large Scale Integration of Renewable Energy, Need for Balancing, Deviation Settlement Mechanism’ (DSM) and associated issues has put forth a 15-point action plan for facilitating large scale integration of renewables in the country in a secure and reliable manner.

Some of the actions have been completed with active support of Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC), State Energy Regulatory Commission and other stake holders, while regulatory framework for Intra-State Settlement and Imbalance Handling has already been implemented in five states.

Releasing the report, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power, Coal and New and Renewable Energy Piyush Goyal said this is going to be a “game-changing” report, which will set up unparallel benchmarks in the world and promised to diligently work on recommendations of the report.

He also launched Ancillary Services Operations in India.

India has set an ambitious target of achieving 175 GW of renewable generation capacity, and in order to integrate such high penetration of renewable energy and address the concerns of the stakeholders in renewable energy, a high-level technical committee was constituted with members from Ministry of Power, Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC), Central Electricity Authority (CEA), renewable rich states like Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Power Utilities like PGCIL, Power System operation Corporation Ltd. (POSOCO) among others.

Taking about the grid management, Goyal said his team would take up ‘one nation, one grid, one price 24X7’ on mission mode.

Goyal explained his action plan for international support by informing that India will provide free of cost technical support for strengthening of grid systems of the neighbouring the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries and under developed countries in other part of the world.

Suggesting on large scale integration of renewable energy, the Technical Committee, said: “There is need for more frequent market clearing in power exchanges, that is, multiple iterations in day-ahead segment and new products like real time market, flexibility markets, capacity markets etc.”

An expert panel has been pitched for real-time trading of power and making energy exchanges more flexible and robust in the country in view of integration of achieving 175 GW of renewable generation capacity by 2022.

The committee had extensive deliberations and has recommended several actions such as bringing flexibility in the conventional generation, frequency control, generation reserves, ancillary services, forecasting, scheduling, deviation settlement mechanism, balancing requirement, data telemetry and communication, Renewable Energy Management Centres, Transmission system augmentation and strengthening as well as certain compliance actions at renewable generation front. (ANI)